Faith -based communities in the country have been challenged to equip their youth to build emotional resilience to deflect the emotional impact of modern life.

The clarion call was made by Ghana’s first certified emotional intelligence coach and Social Emotional Development Institute Director for Africa, Mr. James Kwesi Addison, at the just ended ‘Victory Bible Church Youth Empowerment Week, 2017’.  

He observed that the church has traditionally been central to community life and is focused on the development of young people through events, learning and group activities.

However, the emotional intelligence coach, pointed out that rapid social change, technological advances with social networking and sinking levels of youth engagement with society, have caused a rise in youth related anxiety, self-harm, self-medication and crime, with research indicating that the causes stem from the lack of emotional preparedness for life and the skills to be emotionally resilient.

In order to tackle these challenges, he said there was the need to create qualified specialists within faith based communities to lead on building emotional resilience in young people and disclosed that he was launching the SEDS Qualification into West Africa. “This will enable Africans to create an indigenous specialist capability deep within faith based communities,” he added.

“These specialists will be supported to deliver social emotional development activities with young people to build emotional resilience. SEDS is a proprietary, fully regulated professional qualification in social emotional development practice – which is regulated on the English National Register for Qualifications, and James is now making it available in West Africa,” Mr Addison further said.

He said young people must have access to a learning and development process which empowers them to build the skills for emotional resilience, adding that his outfit was launching its ground-breaking Resilient Youth programme directly for young Africans to undertake.

“Resilient Youth is a progressive learning and development process for large numbers of young people to join and build their self-awareness plus the social emotional skills which equip them to be emotionally resilient. It used the classroom, mentor and digital learning to embed a new capability in young people,” he said.

James Addison announced that he had just completed the first assessment of African youth emotional resilience, with over 1,300 young Ghanaians aged 12 to 17years old benchmarked using a rigorous emotional psychometric assessment which defines their existing emotional resilience.

He announced that he would use this the assessment and benchmarking process to measure the impact of the social emotional development of young people in Ghana, to fully validate the process and provide tangible evidence of emotional resilience development.